Dreams and childhood memories are his main source materials. He works with found materials transforming them into small spaces that interrupt our own physical space. This creates instability within the spaces confronting the viewer with the idea of dual realities and consequently with dual identities. The duality is emphasized by the materiality of the objects themselves and the sources that are used to construct them.

Juan studied at New Mexico State University (BFA emphasis on painting 2010) and has recently acquired a Master in Fine Arts at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

I am a first generation Mexican-American born and raised in the southwest part of the United States. I was trained in very traditional painting methods. Dreams and childhood memories are my main source materials, which carried on from my undergraduate painted works. Memories serve as an initial skeleton for the objects I create. Once the idea is set, I create a compromise between the memory itself and the formal issues that surround the object.

I have started to incorporate mixed media into my practice and my work fluctuates between painting and sculpture. The materials are anything and everything that can be easily manipulated and integrated. Plastic, wire, paper, cardboard, fabric, and wire mesh are some materials that I like to work with because of their practicality and their malleability. Through the use of perspectival moments, such as horizon lines and vantage points, objects function in a similar way to paintings. However, unlike with a two dimensional form, once the viewer moves away from the assigned vantage point the pictorial image starts to break down. Originally I believed that nostalgia, memories and dreams were the central components to the work. As the work progressed I began to consider the space the objects inhabited and that has become a major part of the making. I believe this is because the mini spaces and their materiality started to reflect how memories worked in my own psyche.

Memories transport you, interrupt daily life and can easily be confused by the reality of another memory. Colliding memories can be polluting to the original event. The objects I make don’t consider the space they inhabit. They interrupt and create their own space within the larger space. The materials have a dual existence within the object that comprises two separate realities: The reality of the material itself, as it exists in our world, and the reality that the material alludes to in the illusion I make. Cardboard can stand in for a piece of dirt; a button can be mistaken for a glowing street light. This parallels how memories are comprised of several realities: The reality of what happened initially in the memory, our memory now and everything that happened in between. What is a reality in the world of the mini space can not be true in our world -yet, the tension that is created when one can not decipher where one reality stops and the other starts is fascinating to me. - Juan C. Escobedo